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This book is a unique study of a neglected period of English writing. It places mid-Tudor literature within the context of important debates about English nationhood, the nature of the English Reformation and English humanism, the growth of the political nation, and how Renaissance writers constructed authorial identities in manuscript and print.

This essay examines the role of reading in the campaign against Mary Queen of Scots between her downfall in 1567 and her eventual execution in 1587. Drawing on dialogues, treatises, letters, and broadside ballads in Scots, French, and English, in manuscript and print, Cathy Shrank traces the evolution of the propaganda campaign. She explores the intertextuality of this polemical material (particularly the recurrent images of Clytemnestra and Medea) and how the form in which works circulated can help us reconstruct their reception and intended use.

Possibly, the decision to attach the label \"sonnets\" to these heterogeneous poems was an attempt to market the collections to the same audience who flocked to buy Tottel's Songes and Sonettes, a Tudor bestseller-also known as Tottel's Miscellany-that went through two editions and a resetting in seven weeks when it was first printed in 1557 and which was published a further seven times over the next three decades.\\n Indeed, in many ways, the mixed form and, above all, subject matter of the earlier Tudor collections provide a much more pertinent background against which to place a text like Shakespeare's Sonnets than those of his immediate predecessors, Sidney and Spenser. A4^sup v^.52 Contrary to Marotti's analysis of lyric poetry as \"a genre for gentlemen-amateurs who ... essentially thought of poems as trifles to be transmitted in manuscripts within a limited social world and not as literary monuments to be preserved in printed editions for posterity,\" there were thus-in the mid-Tudor period-\"gentlemanly\" poets who at once insisted on their social status and who sought the \"monumentality\" of print.53 As Neville writes in his prefatory poem to Googe's Eglogs Epytaphes, and Sonettes, \"Thy famous wrytyngs are[:] by them / Thou lyuest and euer shalt\" sig.

In 1612 Michael Drayton complained about the “great disadvantage” of print publication at a time when “nothing [is] esteem'd, … but what is kept in Cabinets, and must only passe by Transcription.” Drayton's dismay at the primacy of manuscript over print illustrates what Harold Love has assessed, well into the seventeenth century, as “the exclusivity of the scribal medium.” Cathy Shrank, in “‘These fewe scribbled rules’: Representing Scribal Intimacy in Early Modern Print,” examines, first, the readiness of authors to exploit the intimate potential of the scribal medium, and second, the attempts—both linguistic and typographic—to recreate that intimacy in print. She focuses on the Henrician and Edwardian periods, and in particular manuscript epistolary form in the printing of the works of William Thomas between 1548 and 1554.

Shrank addresses two recurrent concerns of criticism on Coriolanus: politics and language. She suggests considering more localized contexts as a way of reconciling the incontrovertibly political nature and republican setting of Coriolanus with the monarchial society within which it was produced.

This chapter examines two contentions conducted through broadsides and short pamphlets: the first, between Thomas Smyth, William Gray, and others in 1540 reacts to the fall of Cromwell and debates the religious identity of a loyal subject; the second, dating from around 1551, between Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Camell, and others, argues about who can critique authority. These controversies reveal how Tudor authors utilized cheap print to engage with contemporary politics; in doing so, these writers not only comment on matters of state, they also define their role, as citizens and subjects, within the polity whose affairs they feel able and compelled to discuss.

Both building upon and extending work by Patrick Collinson and other historians, she reconstructs a literary-political world in which England was conceived of less as an absolute kingdom than as a kind of 'monarchical republic', whose citizen-subjects had a critical role to play in the shaping of the policy of the commonweal. [...]inspired by the work of Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Loewenstein, Shrank's book is sensitive to processes of authorial self-fashioning and self-composition and, following Harold Love, to the continuing significance of scribal publication in an age of the burgeoning printed word. The final chapter of the book traces the culmination of these themes in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Sidney's Old Arcadia, arguing that these works, like their predecessors, are torn between classical and vernacular models and represent a deliberate attempt to cultivate and create a vernacular style in a context in which the English language was still regarded as somewhat base and vulgar.

This chapter explores the dialogic tendencies of sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century verse. It examines the varied ways in which poets used answer poems and other dialogue forms: as a means of debate, discussion, display, or of establishing and consolidating relationships. In the process, it highlights the cultural significance of conversational forms and reveals the widespread and deep‐rooted nature of early modern versifying.